Accenture Tries Chatbot for Code of Conduct

Accenture has unleashed a flood of visits to its code-of-business-ethics website with a chatbot that lets staff answer compliance questions without plowing through lengthy documents.

Chad Jerdee, the management consultant's general counsel and chief compliance officer, spoke with Risk & Compliance Journal about how Accenture developed the bot and what it plans to do with it.

Who developed the bot? How long did it take to build? To your knowledge, is this the first use of a compliance-related bot?

Mr. Jerdee: The bot was developed internally by Accenture. We have a digital marketing service that we offer to clients we call Fjord, and they develop streamlined, simplified interactions with clients backed by technology.

One of the things they do is design-led thinking, which puts the end user at the forefront and understands what their experience would be. Then, Fjord designs it, along with technology, to drive the experience and achieve the outcome.

Design to build took about 12 months, and I have not heard of other companies using technology like this. Not at this level.

Provide an overview of the topics available for discussion with the bot.

Mr. Jerdee: This goes hand in hand with the update to our code of business ethics. The six fundamental behaviors we try to achieve through the bot and the code are: make your conduct count; compliance with laws; delivering for our clients; protecting people, information and our business; running our business responsibly; and being a good corporate citizen.

That’s more than just legal compliance; it’s responsible, legal and ethical behaviors in the marketplace, how we treat each other, and how we serve our customers.

Questions and interactions with the bot are kept confidential to protect the identity of the employees.

How do employees reach the bot? How often do they interact with it? What are the advantages of having employees interact this way with the code of conduct?

Mr. Jerdee: On our code of business ethics website, there’s a bot interface on it, and it’s mobile-enabled as well. We have over 2,000 visits a week, up 20 times from before we launched the bot. Employees are accessing it on a daily and weekly basis, which solves one of the problems we wanted to fix.

Ethics and compliance, if you just look at the external environment in today’s world, is becoming increasingly broad and increasingly complicated. Investors, board members and other constituents are demanding that companies step up and behave ethically in ways that are beyond traditional compliance concerns, such as with social responsibility.

Employees are also asking more and more questions beyond the areas of traditional compliance. And, particularly, our population of employees, which includes a lot of millennials and those younger, want to work for a company that is ethical, committed to ethics and provides them real-time tools to behave ethically.

What the chatbot does is rather than giving employees a lengthy document or forcing them to search for answers, does all that work for them and provides them with answers or points them in the right direction to get those answers.

Does the bot provide stock answers, and if so, how many? Does it have a learning capacity based on the messages it receives?

Mr. Jerdee: The bot has a learning capacity, which we are continuing to advance. It doesn’t provide pre-scripted answers, in the sense that you get the same answers for every question you ask. But it does have a search capability that pulls from the code and other areas to provide answers from our databases.

Can the bot refer an employee to HR, or, potentially, refer concerns to the government?

Mr. Jerdee: The bot doesn't have a reporting element, but it encourages people, if they have problems, to report it to appropriate channels, including legal, HR and/or government authorities if appropriate. That’s also embedded in all the training we do.

Do you plan on using it with your clients?

Mr. Jerdee: Yes, it is certainly available to clients. We have not actively marketed the bot to other clients, but bots and things like it are items that we offer to clients. I would be happy to sell it to other clients because a rising tide lifts all boats. The more we can provide tools for all companies to enable ethical behavior, the better off all companies will be, as will society.

Write to Samuel Rubenfeld at Samuel.Rubenfeld@wsj.com. Follow him on Twitter at @srubenfeld.